


By the Fire

by Leaves_Crown



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Chance Meetings, F/M, Foe Yay, Siberia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-26 00:30:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/959420
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leaves_Crown/pseuds/Leaves_Crown
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Draco tries to find solitude in Siberia and had not expected to meet <i>her</i> there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	By the Fire

He had flown all the way to Russia, had taken normal trains and walked for miles to a Siberian village without once waving his wand to feel warmer. 

And still he had to meet one of _them_. 

She sat slumped over her table, rubbing the back of her head, as if she was in pain. Or perhaps she was just trying to dry her snow-covered hair in a muggle way.

Draco glanced around the bar. A bunch of old men sat in a corner, playing cards. They paid little attention to the young woman or him, but the same could not be said for the two thirty-somethings two tables away from her. They spoke softly, but had their eyes on her.

Squinting his eyes, he tried to determine if they were wizards. Nothing pointed in that direction, yet then again, nothing would have made an outsider guess that Granger was a skilled witch. 

_What was she doing here?_

“A beer please,” he said in accented Russian. 

The bartender, the only other woman in this run-down place, nodded and poured him some in a brand he had not tasted yet. He took his pint to Granger’s table. 

“Will I never get rid of you pests?” he sneered.

She did not even glance up. “Come to gloat?”

“At what?” He sipped from his drink and sat down. Not bad. 

“Are you in league with them?” she whispered.

“In league with who?” he leaned closer. “Those guys bordering you?”

“What guys…?” she moved her head a bit to the right. “No, they’ve nothing to do with it.”

Intrigued, but not wanting to seem so, Draco enjoyed his beer for a minute before he spoke again. “You lot found another dark wizard to battle?”

Granger shivered. 

Draco paused. “Are you well?”

Her hand come up, fingers trembling. She barely managed to point her wand at him. Only now he saw that she was bleeding. Not moving too quickly, to make sure he would not wound her further, he put his hand on her chin and tilted it upwards.

Draco’s eyes widened at how pale she was. “You need a doctor!”

“I just need some rest,” she said, hand falling back to the table. “They… you…”

“I had nothing to do with it, I swear.” He stood up and offered his arm to lean on. “I came here to avoid everyone. Not get dragged into your misadventures.”

She slowly stood up, holding onto him. 

“Come,” he said softly. 

The bartender made as if to stop him from leaving, so Draco rummaged in his pocket and produced one of his golden coins. She seemed surprised, but not as much as that waiter in Moscow last week.

“Is there a hotel nearby?”

“You can stay in Cherkesov’s house. He’s in Irkutsk for the winter.” She got an iron box and opened it. She took out two keys. “It’s the one with the red door at the end of the street. I feed his cats.”

“Thank you,” he said, offering her another golden coin.

She held up her wrinkled hand. “The first one was quite enough.”

Draco nodded and, feeling Granger lean on him more, hurried out. 

Outside, it had stopped snowing. It was dead quiet and he shifted his arm to better support his old enemy. 

“I’m fine,” she said, stumbling. 

“Not really.”

He got her to the house, but when he took out his wand to unlock it, Granger stopped him with her hand. “No magic.”

Wondering if there was real danger or if she was having a fever, he humored her and fumbled with the keys. 

She exchanged a glance with him and he could tell she found it amusing, despite everything. 

“Well, here we are,” he said.

It was chilly inside, but better than the cold outside. One cat came up meowing, while another shot upstairs. The living room was smaller than he had thought, but with a hearth and a big, but old sofa. He helped her onto it and then went back to close the door.

Granger tried to get rid of her filthy and blood-splattered coat.

“Where are you hurt?” Draco asked.

“Just my arm.”

“Sit still then.” 

He kneeled in front of her and gently pulled the sleeve off her painful arm. She gritted her teeth, but made no sound. 

Tossing it to the side, Draco went to make a fire. “Are you sure I shouldn’t use magic?”

“Not sure, but just in case.”

“So, what should I do? Rub those logs together until they alight?”

She laughed until a spasm of pain shot through her. “No, you take that little box there and get a match… one of those sticks out. Then you strike it against the side of the box.”

Sighing, Draco did as he was told. Still, when the stick actually did alight, he had to suppress an admiration for muggle inventiveness.

It extinguished before the logs burned, but the third one did the trick. He took his boots off and found a dusty blanket in a closet. He smashed it against the wall a few times. The dust made him cough. 

Granger looked at him surprised. “You should have done that outside.”

He sat down down next to her. “You look worse than me.”

“I know.” 

“Let me see your arm.”

Her gaze sparkled with the old distrust between them, but she held it out after a few moments. Draco rolled up the wet sleeve. There were bitemarks and scratches.

“That is not from a werewolf, is it?”

She shook her head and cringed when he lightly touched it. 

“It should be treated.”

“I’m fine.” She pulled back her arm, but he held onto her elbow. 

Taking out his wand, he pointed it at her marred skin. “Episkey.”

“Malfoy!”

“Yes?”

“I told you not to use magic.”

He arched an eyebrow. “You are still alive, aren’t you?”

“And?”

“If you can survive whatever it is you fought here, I most certainly can.”

She rolled her eyes, but some of her tension disappeared as her skin started to heal. Draco went to the kitchen. There was canned soup and a half-finished bottle of vodka in a cupboard. Scraping the contents of two cans onto plates, he took the bottle and two glasses back to the living room. 

As he poured, she heated the soup with a quick spell and started wolfing it down. He ate slower, but enjoyed the sustenance just as well.

“So, ministry business?”

“Yes.”

“Which you will not tell me about?”

“That is right.” She glanced at him and her face softened. “Thank you for helping me.”

“Of course, I am reformed now,” he said, with a hint of irony to keep her guessing. 

“When did you learn Russian?”

“I have always known it. I stayed with my father’s relatives in Yekaterinburg as a child and my mother insisted I would continue to practice.”

“We never knew,” she said, as if she doubted this story.

He took a big gulp of his vodka. “Did you ever care to know?”

Her eyes narrowed. “You hated me even before you met me. As you did all… mudbloods.”

“That is correct.” He did not say anything defend or explain himself. “Would you care for a drink?”

“Might as well.” 

Amused, he watched her as she took a sip and coughed.

“Is Russian hard to learn?” she asked.

“Not so much as a child, but if you start as an adult, it is.”

Her gaze fell on the bottle. “That means vodka?”

“Yes. You pronounce that as a ‘V’, not a ‘B’.”

“Oh?” She looked intently at the label. Draco remembered that gaze from school. She always looked like that when she had found a new topic to study. To humor her, he wrote a few Russian letters on the wall with temporary light.

“That means?”

“Alcohol.”

Draco wrote a few more words on the wall that were very like their English translations, and she studied them carefully. 

“You can let them disappear,” she said after a few minutes.

After he did, she began to write the names of Russian cities on the ceiling. Draco said nothing, but quietly admired her quick understanding. 

She took another sip of vodka and smiled when he drew her in a Russian dress and headdress on the wall. “You draw well.”

“Took me a long time to be able to do that,” he admitted, stretching himself in the warmth that came from the fire. “Can you?”

“About as well as I play quidditch.” She made an attempt at him anyway.

“That is me as a vampire?” he asked when she put her wand down.

“A magician. They are people who do magic tricks in front of muggles.”

But Draco said nothing, for he very well knew what a magician was. His father had boasted often about having tortured one when he had been a teenager. 

Granger yawned and put her glass down. She watched him draw Hogwarts on the wall, but fell asleep when he got to the Astronomy tower. Draco watched her for a while. She looked more relaxed in her sleep and lost that nervousness that had always accompanied her. 

He drew the blankets over them both and fell asleep by the sounds of the fire. 

When he woke up just after dawn, she had gone. But she had written something on the wall:

**Goodbye Malfoy.**

Under it she had made an attempt at drawing him as he slept. 

He did not know why it cheered him so much. Gathering his things, he did realize that he not had such a good evening in a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this as a one-shot, but I now I feel like writing a sequel. 
> 
> Should I?


End file.
